We will not meet again, my love

Sometimes I like to write in ballad style. This is one such. WE WILL NOT MEET AGAIN, MY LOVE We will not meet again, my love, Till all the seas run dry You will not be alone, my love If only you should cry. The woods have grown high, my love, I cannot see the [...]

Book Review: Brian Aldiss, “Greybeard”

Brian Aldiss is of course an eminent name in Science Fiction and this is one of his most admired books – but it left me vaguely dissatisfied. The premise is an original and interesting one. Many SF stories start with the premise that humanity has been nearly wiped out (bit difficult to make a book [...]

Selected Poems of Simon Banks

(Well, about half my poems don’t make it on to the word file. They may survive in a handwritten notebook, or they may have been scrawled on a piece of paper and then I don’t rate them. From the word file a selection gets posted here – and from that, some which most seem to [...]

The Flying Dutchman

A newly-posted poem. I can tell you precisely where I put it together – walking from the youth hostel just outside Minehead in Somerset and the nearest pub. Minehead, by the way, is next door to Porlock, famous for the “gentleman from Porlock” who according to Coleridge interrupted his reverie when he was composing “Kubla [...]

Strange poems here. Perhaps the poet really meant…

On with a few more reblogged poems now with added explanation. Hmm… could try a “three poems for the price of two” offer or an extra-long poem for the same price as a short one. No?   BRITISH NATIONALITY   Nobody gave me a choice Of where I’d like to be born Nobody set me [...]

Of course, I don’t really know what I meant…

According to some academics, it’s meaningless to ask what a writer meant, or at least, pointless because we can’t tell. Maybe nothing means anything. This is an attitude that could only exist in academia. People everywhere else are engaged in the risky, uncertain business of guessing what other people mean all the time. A general [...]

Erm… I think I really meant…

So I’m carrying on commenting on some of my own poems already posted. These were written at a time when I was coming out of a period of great stress occasioned by a family illness. Writing such poems was part of the emergence from that period and they carry a certain bleakness as well as [...]

Still Trying to Explain Myself

which if you go by the Latin origin, means “to lay myself out flat”. So that’s why it’s difficult.   By the way, when I re-posted the last batch of poems, they somehow lost the gaps between the verses and also a distinctive layout for one poem (“Wolf”). I’ve now restored these features. For “Wolf” [...]

Instructions

Ever puzzled over the instructions which came with some new household machine, car manual or flat-pack furniture?   Life is like that…   INSTRUCTIONS   I bought this thing quite a long time ago But never needed it, so never assembled The impressive confusing parts But now I’ve started to read the instructions And as [...]

Expedition

Another take on exploration – this time influenced by reading about early European explorers of Australia and their fixed belief that there was a huge inland sea. This is not, though, a poem about them, but something less rational and measurable.   EXPEDITION   It is a long way home from this last camp We [...]

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